


endlessly turning inwards

by nosecoffee



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Bad coping mechanisms, Best Friends, Canon Compliant, Codependency, Comfort, Coping Mechanisms, Dirk in his rebellious phase, Experimentation, Hurt, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, Multi, Nightmares, Project Blackwing (Dirk Gently), Scars, Smoking, Torture, Trauma, Vague Gore, Violence, post blackwing, teenagers making bad decisions, the kids aren't alright, theyre on the run, tragic backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-02-12 13:17:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12960033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nosecoffee/pseuds/nosecoffee
Summary: She cheats at Russian Roulette (because the universe won't let her be killed, so she'll always win, no matter what) and they make away with the money, pretending she's not covered in blood, and Dirk watches it flow down the drain of a nice hotels shower as she scrubs it off her skin, going pink as it dilutes itself in the water.She eats four flapjacks at a roadside diner and holds the staff at gunpoint until she and Dirk can make a quick getaway without being followed, so that they don't have to pay.And, eventually, she leaves.(Or, if Dirk and Bart escaped Blackwing together)





	endlessly turning inwards

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Bart's monologue in 1x01
> 
> I'm not really sure what this is. I think I kinda wanted to experiment with their dynamic and it just morphed into me fucking them up for not good reason. Enjoy?

Dirk hears knocking on the other side of the cement wall. He is sixteen years old, and he thinks he's imagining it for a minute. But, no, someone is knocking on the wall.

One. One, two. One.

It's a rhythm, or a pattern, or a code. Dirk leans against the wall, and listens for a while. It repeats. He starts to knock back.

A pause.

And the knocking resumes.

~

He realises, not long after that, that he can hear her screaming through the wall. He can hear her sobbing and begging them to take her down and screaming.

Dirk wills the universe to take pity on her. Can't it see how much the girl on the other side of the cement wall is suffering?

There's a sickening crunching, cracking, _snapping_ noise, and then a heavy thump, and then silence, on the other side of the wall, punctuated only by her soft crying. She doesn't stop crying all night.

Dirk knocks on the wall and hopes that she's hears him. Hopes that it helps.

~

The guards who stand outside his door call her Project Marzanna.

 _Project Marzanna killed another doctor, yesterday,_ the guards say, and they think that Dirk can't hear them through the door. _Project Marzanna was left hanging for three hours until she passed out. Project Marzanna's been transferred to the medical bay. Too much bloodloss,_ the guards outside Dirk's door say.

Project Marzanna wrapped her legs around the doctor's head and twisted until his neck snapped. They knew the moment he was dead. They let her hang there, anyway.

~

Dirk never sees the inside of her cell. He supposes she never sees the inside of his, either. All he knows is that one day an alarm goes off. Alarms never go off. But this one does.

The guards who stand outside his door barge in, fit his wrists with handcuffs and drag him, out of his room, and down the corridor. Ahead of them is a girl with red hair braided against her head, in a black jumpsuit with a blue stripe across the torso, being led by four guards.

Dirk can't help but wonder if she's the girl on the other side of the cement wall. Can't help but wonder if she's Project Marzanna.

He gets his answer a second later when she flips and kicks one of her guards directly into the wall, using the chain he was holding that's attached to the belt around her waist to choke him. The other three guards, as well as both of Dirk's all begin to yell, indistinctly, at her, pointing their guns.

Dirk realises now that her jumpsuit hangs open, and blood drips steadily from a puncture wound in her chest, staining the lighter material of her jumpsuit. He supposes they must have been in the middle of something when the alarm went off. He supposes she hasn't every good reason to attack them.

Marzanna releases him, but by the time her guards realised that she's taken his gun, it's too late. Blood sprays across Dirk's face. His guards were hit. He wasn't, by some miracle.

Dirk gazes at her, rifling through their pockets for a key. She's obviously just as powerful as his guards had feared she was. She waves the key at him, once she's unlocked herself and stepped out of the belt chaining her to the four corpses on the ground, rubbing, vaguely, at her scarred, bleeding wrists.

"Wanna get out of here?" She asks him.

Dirk can't find it in him to be scared of her. He steps forward, wrists outstretched. Project Marzanna grins.

~

There's nothing even vaguely freeing about suddenly being on the run. Because they're teenagers, and they just escaped eight years worth of electrocution and cages and chains around their wrists, and suddenly they're on a nationwide most wanted list, and never did Dirk ever anticipate something even close to that.

Somehow, though, he feels alright with it. A sense of calm fills him, drowning the pnic that rises when he thinks of how he didn't think, just ran. Dirk decides he can live with running from the people who stole him away and then proceeded to neglect him for years.

Especially if she'll stay with him. He feels like no one would ever get what they've been through. But Marzanna gets him, even a little, and Dirk is trying to hard to get her, trying so hard to be that person for her to feel safe with, even though she's been betrayed too many times to count.

They have enough scars to share for a lifetime.

It's a fluke that they escaped together, at all. She could have just left him there, in a corridor full of corpses, with his wrists chained together. But she didn't. She was kind, even if the guards who stood outside his door said she was the most evil thing to ever walk the earth.

It's a fluke that they've stayed together as long as they have. Thankfully, the universe has pity on them; it lets them sleep in shitty roadside motels, and rent movies that they never end up returning or properly paying for. It helps them steal a car from a Target parking lot and drive off into the distance, laughing as a Cindy Lauper song plays out of the stereo.

Marzanna drives with care. Like she knows that the universe put her on the earth to kill people, but she isn't gonna do it by accident. Dirk, however, drives like he's always in mortal peril. Marzanna seems to like that.

So, maybe he was wrong. Maybe they are free and he just needed to relax and sink into it. Just needed time to process thqt he's not going back to the little room with the cement walls where no one will open the door even if he screams at the top of his lungs. Dirk processes it. Dirk sinks into it. Marzanna smiles, wickedly.

They're free.

~

Dirk knows it's not all andventurous and fantastic, and it's not all good.

There's a scar on her chest, just to the right of her heart, and when he asked, Marzanna told him where it came from. How her cell was different from his. He had a bed and basin and a toilet. She had a cage and there was a meat hook on a chain, hanging from the ceiling.

When Dirk has a nightmare, he dreams of peeling his fist off the cement wall, leaving a bloody handprint on it, and knowing it will be gone the next morning, but there will be no one there, no trace of anything to show for it. He dreams of screaming and shouting and throwing things, like a child having a tantrum, hoping, even, that a guard will come in to shut him up, tell him to stop causing a commotion, just because he's _so lonely._

Marzanna has nightmares about being impaled on the meat hook, over and over again, wrists bound together with tight iron cuffs that chafed her wrists, left hanging too many inches off the ground, dangling, swaying too much, in agonising pain, blood dripping down her front, and knowing it will be healed soon enough, knowing once they're done experimenting on her, they'll just toss her in the cage and leave her to cry about it and bleed over it.

Dirk knows he'll never know fear the way she has.

But he can comfort her.

Dirk shakes her awake and then holds her by the wrists, too high up for her to think they're the handcuffs, until she stops fighting him. She doesn't really like it when he touches her, but she lets him hold her while she cries.

It's only then that he can think that no one will ever know him the way Marzanna does. It's only then that he can think that if he ever loses her, he'll be lost.

He holds her tighter and whispers to the universe that if it ever takes her from him, it'll have hell to pay.

~

Marzanna tells him she can handle it, but after nightmares like those, she walks like the dead. She acts like it didn't affect her, but the toll is obvious. But he lets her go on with her charade. He lets her live like she wants to because god knows she deserves it.

~

He watches her steal a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from a convenience store while he's filling the car with gas, and frowns.

His frown deepens when she tries to smoke them in the car. Dirk bats it out of her hand when she's only halfway through the cigarette and coughing like nothing else. Marzanna protests, and protests louder and more violently when he tosses the rest of the pack out the window as well.

Dirk doesn't care. It burns his nostrils and makes him feel faint. The man who came to get him and bring him to Blackwing in the first place smelled like smoke. The guards outside his door used to smoke and it used to leak through the crack under his door and Dirk used to cough so hard that he felt like he was dying.

He knows she's only trying to find something to do with her hands. He knows she's only trying to find a coping mechanism that isn't so self destructive as digging her fingernails into the scars on her wrists. They need to find something else.

He feels like his eyes are burning.

~

On quiet nights, on nights when they end up on an empty road in the middle of nowhere, just them and the dust and the sky, she lets him touch her scars. Dirk lets his fingertips graze against the puckered skin of her wrists, the pink scars that wind around her arms, where the cuffs used to bite into her, without forgiveness.

She touches his back - it's only fair, he reasons, that if she opens up to him, he must open up to her - she traces the jagged scars that run down his spine, over his shoulderblades, ending, abrubtly, at his lower back. She says they look like wings. He shivers.

(If Blackwing gave him wings, and he's Icarus, does that make her the sun? Or does that make her Daedalus? Dirk doesn't know if he'll ever fully figure it all out. Dirk doesn't think the universe will ever be that kind to him, to let him tie up the loose ends.)

At least on the nights on empty roads, in the middle of nowhere, at least there they don't have to pretend to be anything that they're not.

~

Dirk doesn't know quite when he realised that he loved her like she was his long lost sister.

~

She hangs out the window, driving through a desert and screams at the sky, daring the universe to ruin her, ruin them, to hit them with what it had. She challenges it, goads it, tells it that they can take it, can't it see?

She cheats at Russian Roulette (because the universe won't let her be killed, so she'll always win, no matter what) and they make away with the money, pretending she's not covered in blood, and Dirk watches it flow down the drain of a nice hotels shower as she scrubs it off her skin, going pink as it dilutes itself in the water.

She eats four flapjacks at a roadside diner and holds the staff at gunpoint until she and Dirk can make a quick getaway without being followed, so that they don't have to pay.

She seems like she's too good to be true, and, sure, she kills the odd person here and there on their travels, as they run as far as they can from the past, sixteen years old and so curious about the world, but Dirk doesn't care. Because she's there, and she gets it when he wakes up screaming, or when he can't drive for a minute. She gets it.

She's the fog on a far off hill in the morning after a rushed breakfast from a McDonald's drive-thru.

(Dirk knows it doesn't really mean anything, that the reason they're together in the first place is the universe saw that they were lonely and just needed the feel of someone who cared close, needed the reminder that they weren't alone and that someone else got it, but, either way, he likes the idea of spending the rest of his life with her, like this, just driving around, following where the universe leads them, stopping when they need, laughter torn and tattered on the wind.)

And, eventually, she leaves.

And Dirk has to let her go, even if it feels like she's taking a piece of him with her.

(Dirk doesn't want to have to let her go. Even if she's a reminder of Blackwing, of the wings they carved into his back with every electric shock, of the nightmares that left him with tremors in his hands and a brain screaming at him to claw his way out of the cell, she's all he has left of something even remotely familiar.)

She leaves, and he lives with it.

~

Dirk meets Todd, and Todd cannot be more different from her. He's grumpy and irritable, yes, but grumpy and irritable is different from impulsive and dangerous, and, frankly, easier to deal with. If he's honest, he prefers Todd over Marzanna. But he'd never tell her that.

Not after everything.

Todd eventually accepts what Dirk does, who Dirk is, what he is to the universe, and is less grumpy and irritable, and when he tells Dirk that he's his friend, Dirk feels faint. No one, not even Marzanna, has ever said that to him, and she was as close to a friend as he'd had for his entire life, up until Todd.

Todd is here, of course, to turn the tables.

Dirk couldn't possibly love him more.

(He feels complete for the first time in so long. He don't know that you could love someone without having to give them everything, and feeling empty because they were too scared to give anything back.)

~

Dirk thinks she only ever knew him as Icarus. Dirk only ever knew her as Marzanna.

He doesn't see her for years, putting her down as a fever dream, putting her down as a daydream.

And, when he finally sees her again, holding a gun to his head, he sees that the girl - the one who hung out the car window howling and screaming at the sky and whooping that they were free - is gone. She is the universes tool, only, now.

The universe took up her challenges showed her just how strong she was, and broke her over its knee, moulding her into the perfect killer for it.

Marzanna is gone, the girl on the other side of the cement wall is gone. Bart doesn't seem to remember him, at all.

Dirk hates to admit it, especially after all they went through, but he is weirdly fine with that.

 

**fin.**

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked this. If you did, please let me know what about it you liked in the comments, and/or leave me kudos. You can track me down on Tumblr @nose-coffee and we cna scream about Dirk Gently, together.
> 
> Just a reminder; BBC America has dropped Dirk Gently, but Netflix will pick them back up if the ratings are good when S2 comes out on January Fifth on Netflix. Please help with the ratings so we can have a S3! Thank you!


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